Why You Only Have One Team
calling your departments teams causes problems
Photo by Thomas Park on Unsplash
As your team grows, you start to build out subgroups focused on different areas. Marketing. Development. Product. Sales.
Traditionally, these subgroups are called departments.
Perhaps less traditionally, we start to refer to them as teams.
Our marketing team. Our sales team. Our product team.
This doesn’t sound so bad at first. We want to bring these groups together and enable them to play well as a unit so we can smash our goals and deliver amazing value.
Unfortunately, it often leads to territories being drawn as if we were in the Middle Ages and all the lords of our own tiny kingdoms.
We start to see things as “mine” and “yours.” The goals for each team may not align or even work together at all. And we can even start to compete with each other for resources, the spotlight, or both.
These behaviors can cause problems that range from wasting time to having a culture that undermines itself.
As the leader, you’re the coach. While you may have an offensive line and a defensive line, you only have one team — and your language better make that crystal clear.
Within that team, you have recruited people with different skills and perspectives.
The QB. The kicker. The running back. ➔ The communicator. The developer. The connector.
You want to do everything you can to enable them to do their best work as one effective team driving toward the same goal.
And that’s fulfilling your purpose.
Here are 3 simple things you can do to make that shift today:
Eliminate the word “team” from your lexicon unless you’re talking about the entire team
Communicate the value you’re here to deliver and that it will take all of you working together to make it happen
Invite one of the people you serve (a customer or beneficiary) to share their story to ground and humanize why delivering that value matters
There's only one team — and you're all playing for it.
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